The Truth and Michael Moore, and Other Odd Couples

Let me begin by saying one thing:

ginobiliginobiliginobiliginobiliginobili

(Let that sink in.)

And now on to Moore. The following was composed yesterday, ere game seven.
____________________________________________________________________________________

Let me state one thing at the outset:

Michael Moore is a genius.
And he is not a liar.

Why, then, do I despise him? Because he is not commited to truth. And yet he isn’t a liar; he’s a deceiver. The difference? Liars tell, and deceivers show.

Take this example, shamelessly pulled from this man, which illustrates the difference rather well:

Jim has a dog for a pet. You have never seen his dog, so you just have to take my word for it that he has a dog at his house. As evidence that Jim has a dog I offer the following facts.

1) There is animal hair all over his couch.
2) There are bowls of food and water in his kitchen.
3) He has a box of Hartz flea collars under his sink.
4) He makes regular trips to the veterinarian.
5) He buys canned pet food once a week.

Pretty compelling evidence of my assertion, right? Well, Jim doesn’t have a dog; Jim has a cat.

It’s pretty damn effective, though, and the conspicuous lack of defamation lawsuits against Moore stand as testimony to either his honesty or his skill in this sort of deceptive manipulation (it’s really hard to prove that a man was engaged in defamation when he makes little to any outright claims; see here and here for definitions of libel and defamation). I aim to show that it’s the latter.

Moore’s tactic is almost always the same: take a case/accusation/claim/what-have-you and selectively report the facts about it so that the case appears to validate his point, when in fact it does not, or doesn’t validate it as strongly as he’d like.

“So?” someone could protest. “Almost all reporters do that!”

Not like this, they don’t.

My favorite example of this is in Bowling for Columbine, in the now infamous Heston speech, “from my cold, dead hands.”

Here’s how it appears in Bowling:

Weeping children outside Columbine;
Cut to Charlton Heston holding a musket and proclaiming "I have only five words for you: 'from my cold, dead, hands'";
Cut to billboard advertising the meeting, while Moore intones "Just ten days after the Columbine killings, despite the pleas of a community in mourning, Charlton Heston came to Denver and held a large pro-gun rally for the National Rifle Association;"
Cut to Heston (supposedly) continuing speech... "I have a message from the Mayor, Mr. Wellington Webb, the Mayor of Denver. He sent me this; it says 'don't come here. We don't want you here.' I say to the Mayor this is our country, as Americans we're free to travel wherever we want in our broad land. Don't come here? We're already here!"

Moore has created the following impression: the NRA was blatantly insensitive to the Columbine tragedy, and Heston was/is an ass. Note, however, that he hasn’t said any of these things explicitly.

Here are the things that Moore left out:

1. The “cold, dead hands” speech wasn’t given at Columbine. It was given a year later, in Charlotte, North Carolina.
2. The meeting in Denver, the very one that occurred a mere ten days after Columbine, had been scheduled a year in advance and was required by law (more or less the same law that requires corporations to have an executive meeting once a year to keep their corporation status). The NRA couldn’t move it, as it would require sending out notices to some four million NRA members, any one of which might be coming. So they did the next-best thing – they cancelled all festivities except the meeting required by law.
3. Here is the actual speech Heston gave, which, you will note, is not nearly as insensitive as Moore made it seem. I got this transcript from Moore’s site.
4. The funniest part about this? Heston is wearing two different suits during his “speech,” and talking against two different backgrounds.

Now to Moore’s response, which is here:

I quote, from his site:

From the end of my narration setting up Heston's speech in Denver, with my words, "a big pro-gun rally," every word out of Charlton Heston's mouth was uttered right there in Denver, just 10 days after the Columbine tragedy.

Moore is a genius. He’s right, of course; for his words “big pro-gun ralley” come after Heston says “cold, dead hands.” So he isn’t lying. But his implication is certainly deceptive. He implies that Heston was an ass and that the NRA was blatantly insensitive to the needs of the victims of Columbine. He doesn’t mention at all that the NRA meeting was required by law, or that it had been set up a year in advance, or that most of it had been cancelled except those portions required by law. Those points would hurt the image he’s set up.

(summary here)

Lies? No. Deception, selective editing? Yes. Reprehensible? Well, if you believe George W. Was wrong in implying that the 9/11 attacks came from Iraq (though he never actually said that), then you’d best be consistent and say “yes.”

Let me stress that again – this is the same technique. If you despise one for doing it, you’d better despise the other.

Therein lies what Moore does – put two things close to each other (images, words, etc.) and count on the audience to put two and two together and think it’s one. Let’s take a look at F9/11. The deceptions I’m showing are in no particular order, nor are they necessarily relevant to Moore’s movie as a whole, but they do show that he has sloppy scholarship at best, and uses outright deception at worst.

Moore claims at the beginning of F9/11 that Gore had won, and that Bush stole the election. That can of worms aside, among the evidence he gave in defense of that assertion was a newspaper headline.

The Pantagraph, Latest Florida Recount Shows Gore Won Election

Moore doesn’t state outright that the headline is an actual headline; he just shows it, and the viewer infers that it was, in fact, an actual headline, when it was in fact an editorial that was carefully manipulated to look like a headline. To see just how “carefully” it had to be done, take a look at this comparison of the original and Moore’s video clip.

How about this one, straight from Moore’s website:

The man who was in charge of the decision desk at FOX on election night was Bush’s first cousin, John Ellis.

Right after Moore says this, he cuts to a scene of Bush laughing.

The implication is, of course, that Ellis helped pull the election for Bush. But the claim is only that Bush’s cousin was at the desk, which is the only fact that Moore defends on his website. Any substantial evidence of a conspiracy is conspicuously lacking. And the facts he leaves out?

1. Ellis was a professional election results analyst with 23 years of experience.
2. Ellis worked previously for NBC for 10 years.
3. Eliis actually called the GHW Bush/Clinton election against his uncle, GHW Bush.
4. Ellis was part of a 4 person team of experts , who required a unanimous recommendation before sending it to Moody (one of the experts).
5. John Moody had the final approval / veto power over the recommendation.
6. The data used by Ellis and his team was delivered from VNS (Voter News Service, which was and always has been the first to report the to-the-minute results from the ballot box - in short, Ellis could only know what VNS told him, and all news networks had equal access to VNS. It was only after VNS first called the election for Bush that Fox followed suit.)
7. All of the other news outlets received the same data at the same time.
8. The other news outlets delivered the same results within 4 minutes of Fox’s report.

Read it in full here.

Moore leaves all this out. None of this discounts a conspiracy, but it does make his implied case – that W.’s cousin was working the election – pretty damn threadbare.

This one’s one of my favorites: vacation times.

Moore claims Bush was on vacation 42% of the time. Here is his quote, and his backup for this assertion, straight from his own site:

FAHRENHEIT 9/11: “In his first eight months in office before September 11, George W. Bush was on vacation, according to the Washington Post, forty-two percent of the time.”

· “News coverage has pointedly stressed that W.'s month-long stay at his ranch in Crawford is the longest presidential vacation in 32 years. Washington Post supercomputers calculated that if you add up all his weekends at Camp David, layovers at Kennebunkport and assorted to-ing and fro-ing, W. will have spent 42 percent of his presidency ‘at vacation spots or en route.’” Charles Krauthammer, “A Vacation Bush Deserves,” The Washington Post, August 10, 2001.

Read that carefully.

Weekends.

I’m not sure what Moore is doing here, or if perhaps he’s hoping no one will read his own site. But no organization, company, corporation, what-have-you in the country that I know of counts weekends as vacation days. Note also that there is a HUGE difference in “vacation” and “vacation spots or en route” (and “layovers,” which is the funniest to my mind, because they’re obviously not vacations) which is what Moore’s evidence actually says. The difference is, of course, is that places like Camp David qualify as vacation spots, but the president works there. That’s where he holds most of his meetings with foreign officials – at this point in the movie, for that matter, is a shot of Bush at Camp David talking with Tony Blair.

Point? Again, Moore’s implication is that the President wasn’t working as he should have been. And that may well be true. But the evidence he gives is selective and misleading. The facts that Moore left out of his movie – that “42%” can only be held up when you calculate any and all time physically out of the office – hurts that assertion.

Try this one – Moore approached members of the US Senate and asked them if they’d like to sign their kids up to fight (I could go on at length about the stupidity of this maneuver in the first place, since the military is voluntary and no one, repeat, no one sends their kids to die. But I won’t). Moore carefully cut out the response of at least one senator:

Kennedy: Sure! How can I help?

But he put the rest of the footage in, making Kennedy look like an idiot. In the final cut, Kennedy gives Moore a quizzical look, and then the scene changes.

Again, his point may still stand, that there weren’t many wealthy soldiers fighting in Iraq, or that the Government had carefully protected their own. But in lieu of using a great deal of evidence from those senators, he chose instead to splice Kennedy’s speech. He chose to deceive rather than make a good argument.

It’s late, and I want to get to the bar in time to get a seat for the playoffs. But I’ll update this as time goes by – I’ve certainly left a lot out, including the pipeline in Afghanistan that never materialized, the bin Laden family saying that Moore got facts wrong, etc.

As for what I’ve posted here, MG – please tell me how this is in any way defensible, or refute it.